Never louder than my knees
Lucas de la Rubia
Antwerp, Belgium
About
Lucas de la Rubia is an artist working around sculpture and its peripheral practices.
Project
Last night I dreamed of a staircase leading to a window. From there, I saw a field of olive trees, dry and beautiful.
It was then, for the first time since it happened, that my movements became soft again, real, without thinking about where I placed one foot, then the other… like a fox, or like in heist films where they cross a room without touching anything.
After hearing the detonation, I never saw you again. They told me you stopped running before it happened.
I have to build that staircase.
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Never louder than my knees begins with a paradox: how a body, after thinking too much about its own movements, ends up paralysing itself. An emergency staircase functions as a space of fiction, a place to hold the remnants and fragments of this history. We hear a description of something that happened, something that remained suspended in a place.
On the concrete, landscapes accumulate, drawn, redrawn, reconstructed from memory. Images of a place someone wants to return to but cannot reach directly. A place to feel true again. A silver olive tree rotates slowly, a three-dimensional scan of something that was once touched, now hovering between presence and model, between the real and its copy. A lightbox holds the image of a foot. Of attention. Silicone moulds sit inside plastic crates, like fish in a market.
At the centre of the space, a matrix of objects, fragments, and parts constructs the remains of a story that is never told in full. Each piece belongs to something larger that the viewer cannot entirely see.
Together, these elements do not explain an event. They circle it. Something was transmitted here, something stopped mid-movement, something was left behind by someone who had to go. What it was stays just out of reach, the way a place stays with you long after you have left it, the way a sound keeps arriving even after the source has disappeared.
